Category: art

A guard at the Carnegie International defaced a Vija Celmins painting, Night Sky #2, making a “long vertical gouge” with a key. The conservator calls it a “total loss,” though the Art Institute of Chicago, which owns the 1991 painting, said they would look at the possibility of repairing it.
Though the story only surfaced on Friday in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the incident occurred on May 16th [a Friday]. The guard, an Azerbaijani immigrant named Timur Serebrykov, was confronted about the action and arrested on May 20th [a Tuesday]. He initially denied any wrongdoing, but then he confessed, adding, “I didn’t like the painting.” There were eight Celmins paintings of night skies in the gallery at the time.
Guard charged with ruining museum piece [post-gazette.com via artforum]
Night Sky #2, 1991, Vija Celmins [artic.edu]

Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up Basel:

Ferreira finally teased the name out of the Englishman, who turned out to be Nicholas Logsdail, founder of Lisson Gallery, at which everyone around me seemed to tense up a bit.
After a brief chat with him, he motioned to step away. Shaking my hand he said, “Pleasure to have met you. I suppose if you’re successful, I’ll see you everywhere, and if you’re not, you’ll disappear.”
— Andrew Berardini

[artforum]

Maybe I shouldn’t post about this until I win the auction, but Peter Young’s Folded Mandala paintings are spectacular, an entrancing mix of hippie, psychedelic beauty and rigorously visible process.
Young left the New York art world behind literally while his show was up at Leo Castelli. The Folded Mandala paintings developed after the schism, so on a purely artistic basis, it was the right thing to do.
Career-wise, however, not so much, but then, that was his point. Young’s paintings from the 1960’s-1980’s were the subject of two tantalizing shows last year, at PS1 and at Mitchell Algus. [Algus had the mandalas].
The shows’ favorable reviews apparently tipped off a sharp-eyed estate sale watcher, who picked up this mandala, #27, just a few weeks ago, and is now flipping it at Christie’s. Rather random estimate: $7-9,000.
Update: seriously, what are the odds? I’d read that Young stopped painting grids after visiting Agnes Martin’s studio in the 1960’s, but check out how Young explained the 1966 encounter to the Brooklyn Rail:

Working at Pace as a preparator, Young had the occasion to visit Agnes Martin’s studio. By this point, he had begun making his own grid paintings, a practice he abandoned shortly after his visit. Martin would twice play a pivotal role in his development. On this occasion Martin herself was not present but her paintings were enough to convince him that he had better reconsider his subject. He turned to images of the night sky and the dotting technique that would shortly bring him notoriety.

I notice that Young’s site has many dot works that pre-date his discovery of Martin’s paintings, but this 1967 dot painting, #8, is wonderful, at once abstract and yet evocative. As if it were a photonegative of a sky survey, perhaps.

Weird title for a great review: Kandy-Colored Dot-Flake Streamline Maverick [nyt]
also a nice slideshow [nyt]

Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni was the first to devise a way to visualize the sounds transmitted by solid objects using sand. “He demonstrated the method by sprinkling sand on plates of glass or metal and drawing a bow down their sides to produce a visible vibration pattern called ‘Chladni figures.'”
Chladni published engraved images of these figures in a 1787 portfolio, Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges., a first edition of which is to be auctioned at a sale of The Richard Green Library of Scientific Books, June 17 at Christie’s New York.
CHLADNI, Ernst Florens Friedrich (1756-1827), est. $4,000-6,000 [christies]
Previously, somewhat related: Spatial Vibration: an experiment in visualizing sound by members of Olafur Eliasson Studio

A scroll back through the recent posts on this site will reveal my fascination with sky surveys, astronomers’ attempts to systematically document in photographs the entire sky.
The broadest such survey, the Palomar Sky Survey, completed in the 1950’s, was also the last to remain unpolluted by manmade objects in space. In a 1995 proceedings discussion of sky surveys, Dr D.H. Morgan noted that survey plate contamination had more than doubled since 1980. Pre-1980, 47% of plates contained an average of 1 satellite trail. Since 1980, though, over 70% of plates are contaminated by satellite trails, with an average of 2.1/plate. Some badly affected plates contain 10-15 trails, which diminishes their effectiveness for astronomical purposes.

Trevor Paglen,
LACROSSE ONYX II, from The Other Night Sky [via]
Ironically, it’s exactly these sky surveys–or more precisely, their contamination–that is the subject of geographer/artist Trevor Paglen’s next exhibition, which opens at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive on June 1st. Similar to his extra-long-distance photographs of clandestine government “black sites” and his tracking and documentation of planes used by the CIA for extra-legal renditions, Paglen uses data from amateur satellite-spotting enthusiasts to photograph top secret surveillance satellites in orbit:

Paglen photographs barely perceptible traces of these vessels amidst familiar star fields, in this way borrowing a language of scientific visualization of the cosmos. The multimedia installation at the center of the exhibition The Other Night Sky gestures toward the popular presentation of scientific knowledge in space centers and natural history museums by offering a large-scale globe animated with 189 currently orbiting satellites. Their orbits are traced via complex algorithmic analysis of data. The density of satellites is surprising, their coverage of the globe nearly complete. But the evidentiary function of the work is thwarted—although photographs are named for depicted satellites, faint streaks verify their existence, and the projections track their real-time movements, there is no information to glean from the images about the satellites themselves or their particular roles. And so again Paglen points us to the physical manifestations of the black world, while the images themselves embody the impossibility of translating such an act of seeing into an act of understanding.

Press release: Trevor Paglen: The Other Night Sky (June 1 – September 14, 2008) at BAM/PFA [berkeley.edu thanks elizabeth]
Trevor Paglen’s site

Edward Emerson Barnard was a self-taught astronomer who built a house for himself and his new bride with money earned spotting comets. [A patent medicine magnate was offering $200/comet in the 1880’s; in one year, Barnard spotted eight.] He was the first person to discover a new moon of Jupiter since Gallileo.
In 1895, he became a professor of astronomy at the University of Chicago, which gave him the observatory access he needed to complete one of the first photographic sky surveys. He spent decades, up until his death in 1923, photographing the Milky Way and nebulae, and overseeing the printing of photographs for his survey.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of his cataloguer and assistant Mary Calvert, A Photographic Atlas of Selected Regions of the Milky Way, which was finally published in 1929, in an edition of around 700. It’s a stunning achievement, a handmade artist’s book in the form of pioneering science.

Georgia Tech’s library has digitized their copy of Selected Regions of the Milky Way, which allows broader access, and reduces wear and traffic on the $8-10,000 books. [The example above sold at Skinner’s scientific instruments auction in 2006 for around $7,000. Can’t find the exact number right now.]

From around 1989-92, the German photographer Thomas Ruff created a body of work using astronomical survey photos from the European Southern Observatory in Chile. There is very little discussion online of this series[1], even though I believe it’s the first time Ruff uses a found image in his work. [Before the Sterne series, Ruff was known for his very large portraits of his friends, which he described as “a construct based on identification photographs.” Since then, he has appropriated and manipulated many types of photos, including industrial catalogue illustrations and internet porn.]
Ruff talked briefly about the Star photos in a rather painful 1993 interview with Philip Pocock:

Pocock: Why stars? Do they mean something extra special to you?
Ruff: When I was eighteen I had to decide whether to become an astronomer or a photographer. I also wanted to move the so-called künstlerische Fotografie boundary. Do you know Flusser?
Pocock: No.
Ruff: He defines isolated categories for photography that sometimes cross over. For example, if medical photography is used in a journalistic way, or with the Stars, a scientific archive isn’t used for scientific research but for my idea of what stars look like. It’s also a homage to Karl Bloßfeldt. In the twenties he took photographs of plants to explain to his students architectural archetypes. So he was a researcher but the way he represented his intention with the help of photography made him an artist. I like these crossovers.

All interesting enough, but given the photos he uses, I think the most relevant perspective comes earlier in another part of the interview, where he distinguishes between photographing to “capture reality” and “to make a picture.”
Ruff definitely makes an awesome picture. The Sterne photos are stunning, at least the largest prints–185cm wide by 250cm tall–are. They generally do well at auction, though it sometimes feels like the ones that do better are the “starrier” ones, a notion that seems to play right into Ruff’s interest, inherited from his teachers, Berndt and Hilla Becher, that photographs are cliches, constructs of expectations [“my idea of what stars look like,” even.]
The photos Ruff used came from a project so conceptually ambitious and subjectively constrained, it’d do the Bechers proud. The ESO Southern Sky Atlas was a massive undertaking, an attempt begun in 1972 [images were taken from 1974-1987] to document the entire visible universe. Or at least the half of it visible from the Southern Hemisphere. And just the objects of enough magnitude to show up with the then-new 100-inch UK Schmidt Telescope and the 1m ESO telescope at La Cilla, Chile. And which could be seen on Kodak’s then-new, experimental, hypersensitized emulsion.
The resulting 1,000+ photos are at once evidence of photography’s futile limitations, and one of its greatest artistic achievements; they out-Becher the Bechers. The Sky Atlas is just one of several sky surveys over the 20th century. Each starts out with the same ambitious goal; each takes years of painstaking work; each results in images and objects that exhibit conceptual rigor and contemporary visual appeal in equal amounts; and as technology progresses, each is rendered utterly obsolete by the next survey. Particularly as astronomical data is digitized, the era of producing objects–glass negative plates and photographic prints–has died. Now it sits, at best, forgotten and neglected in university libraries and on storeroom shelves. At worst, it will be cleared out and dumped, replaced–people think–by a small stack of CD-ROMs or a web server.
For such projects, once-scientific milestones that represent an era’s pinnacle of our achievement, the literal attainment of the capacity of human vision, maybe the best thing for them is to stop being science and start being art.
Note to astronomical librarians: if you’re clearing out old sky surveys and atlases, please dump them my way.
[1] At least in English. Henning Engelke wrote about the Sterne series and the science-to-art spectrum, but it’s in German and locked in a in pdf. maybe this google translation of the reformatted html version will be comprehensible.